Multi-domain technologies to address future operational scenarios
“Transforming a company that works across domains into one that works across multi-domains, within a digital continuum.” It is the summary that Roberto Cingolani, CEO and General Manager of Leonardo, makes of the company's strategy to respond to the needs of modern operational theatres, characterised by an increasingly marked interconnection of technologies, which orchestrate, at different levels, terrestrial, aerial, maritime, space and cyber activities, through the common thread of digitalisation and cyber-by-design protection of products, systems, and processes.
In current operational theatres, nations operate in much more complex contexts than in the past, with hybrid threats added to traditional ones, often configuring unstable and confusing environments in which the forces on the field require integrated technological solutions that provide timely responses to defence and security needs.
On the other hand, the rapid progress of technology has brought to the fore - alongside the traditional terrestrial, aerial, and naval scenarios - the new operational domains linked to Space, with the resulting opportunities in terms of downstream satellite services and space cloud, and to the cyber dimension, in its double role as a domain and as a connector and enabler of all the others.
The "battlefield", whether it is a theatre of military operations or an emergency linked to the safety of citizens or infrastructures, is expanding, making the line of demarcation between military and civil operations increasingly thin, since the technological tools available have created completely new conflict environments, in which the combined effect of the interactions between the various systems, and the consequences in case of their compromise, has repercussions in both scenarios.